Showing events on this day in years past that shaped history... just, not our history.

Saturday, February 21, 2015

May 1, 1866 – Military Intervention Halts the Memphis Riot

Years
of civil war had devastated the American South’s economy, and
planters and city officials hoped to come back quickly to prosperity.
Their expectations were interrupted by the new society born out of
the Emancipation Proclamation. Now free to work where they chose,
former slaves left the plantations and moved into cities such as
Memphis along the Mississippi River. Without cheap labor in the
country, the plantations could not reap lucrative harvests. With a
swell of new laborers in the city, the working poor (many of them
Irish immigrants having fled the Great Potato Famine) suddenly found
competition for jobs as Reconstruction began.

To
add to the social stress, the legal status of the newly freed slaves
had been left vague by the Thirteenth Amendment. Some in the South
argued that freedmen without documentation were not even citizens and
could be treated by authority in any way it saw fit. Black Codes were
written up by Southern legislatures to regulate the freedmen through
imprecise language for crimes such as “vagrancy” or “unlawful
assembly” that gave police power to arrest practically anyone at
their discretion. A freedman with a weapon could be labeled an “Armed
Prowler” and arrested or, if he fought back, killed on the spot.
Work-gangs from the prisons would be taken out to plantations,
filling the need for forced labor. If police could not find enough
able bodies, military troops (some of them freedmen themselves) began
grabbing workers off the street, including children on their way to
school.

Yet
the freedmen were not without support. Communities with safety in
numbers formed throughout Southern cities, such as South Memphis near
Fort Pickering, where families of the Third United States Colored
Heavy Artillery had settled. Battle-hardened veterans, the black
soldiers were willing to defend themselves, one time driving police
away from an “illegal” gathering where a group of soldiers’
wives were accused of prostitution. The soldiers, armed as well if
not better than the police they outnumbered, chased them off.

The
tension came to a head at the end of April, 1866, when the 3rd
Artillery was discharged as part of the government’s work toward
demilitarization. Since they had to wait a few days for paperwork and
their last pay, the soldiers found themselves free of responsibility.
They celebrated, walking the streets and dreaming of where they would
go next.

On
May 1, after a few altercations already, city officials sent police
out to break up a large afternoon party. Four policemen attempted to
dispatch dozens of veterans before promptly running away. Chasing led
to gunfire, and then an all-out riot broke as more police and local
white business owners hurried to attack the black former soldiers.
Many of the veterans retreated to Fort Pickering, which remained in
order under military, and the white mob continued on to attack South
Memphis. Appeals to establish order came to General George Stoneman,
who initially felt that such should be the sheriff’s duty.

Yet
Stoneman thought back to his service in the Cavalry Corps under Major
General Joseph Hooker, who had given him orders to raid behind Lee’s
lines and destroy logistics. Stoneman’s raids proved ineffectual,
and Hooker blamed the Union defeat at Chancellorsville on this lack
of drive. Just before midnight, as the few soldiers Stoneman had sent
out returned from quiet streets, he determined to prevent any
follow-up violence. He readied orders to march on Memphis at the
first sound of trouble.

Those
sounds came early the next morning. Rather than the expected
counterattack by black soldiers, a mass of whites charged into South
Memphis as they had the night before, now in larger numbers with much
more vicious intent. Stoneman led the charge, rounding up the rioters
and arresting all but a few who escaped. Rather than being the poor
Irish who competed with the blacks for employment, the mob was
primarily Memphis police and firefighters acting beyond their
jurisdiction, joined by white-collar government officials and
middle-class business owners. Stoneman, being far from a Radical
Republican who would have predicted such activity, was dismayed at
them and handed out punishments according to Tennessee law.

Stoneman’s
quick action was lauded in Northern papers, as was that of the
military in a riot in New Orleans later in July. Because the military
was involved, federal investigations prompted recommendations of
increased oversight that became the Fourteenth Amendment. The Secret
Service, founded the year before to battle counterfeiting, was given
additional charges of cracking down on racial violence. Their powers
were expanded in the Fifteenth Amendment to investigate nonviolent
crimes such as preventing the free exercise in voting.

Southerners
and, soon, others around the nation balked at the perceived invasion
of Federal power, a complete end to states’ rights. Racial actions
by local authorities and secret brotherhoods gave the Secret Service
ample opportunity for headline-grabbing busts and shootouts. Grant’s
Republican administration greatly encouraged the Secret Service,
whose powers expanded and were entrenched by the time of Democratic
Cleveland’s terms. Although famous for their efforts during Jim
Crow to ensure the equality of “Separate but Equal,” Secret
Service investigators were infamous for their ruthless anti-socialist
campaigns in the twentieth century. Some conspiracy theorists hold
the agency responsible for the assassination in Memphis of
poverty-rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., whose Poor People’s
Campaign marched on Washington and rocked the nation from its
foundation.

–

In
reality, General Stoneman did not declare martial law until May 3. By
then, nearly fifty people had been killed, dozens more were injured,
and nearly 100 structures had been burned, including churches and
schools. The violence encouraged the Fourteenth Amendment to protect
African-American rights, yet it would be another century of struggle
until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination by
government or in public places.